Killzone 2’s 1.27 patch live today

It’s tweak time for the Killzone 2 community as Eric Boltjes, Guerrillaâ€™s Lead Multiplayer Designer, talks to the Official US Blog about what Helghan and ISA soldiers alike can expect from the latest update.

Showing an unrivaled commitment to keeping their groundbreaking game as fresh and fair as possible, Guerilla have more than a few important fine-tunings up their electronic sleeves.

If you found finding friends an issue in Killzone 2, prepare to punch the air in a sign of zealous jubilation as new changes will see the option to automatically join a friendâ€™s faction and squad, even if the faction in question has balancing turned on. And, as it’s always nice to stay with friends, squads and faction members will remain persistent over multiple games allowing you to build up an almost Jedi sense of understanding with your teammates.

Next up is a change in Skirmish mode that will see noobs unwilling to get their asses handed to them in the real (Warzone) world able to obtain all the badges in the bot driven mode. Consider this a present from Guerrilla for all you guys and gals out their hamstrung by low bandwidth constraints.

In probably the most controversial of changes, the Dutch mavens have now introduced “High Precision” mode. Remember all those people claiming the controls in Killzone 2 were borked? Well, this is not a response to the criticism of the control’s “weight” but it does result in smaller movements of the analogue sticks being more responsive. A lot of the guys at Guerrilla are now favouring this configuration over the default – which is still available by the way – and it’s interesting to note that High Precision mode is on by default for all new players. Not that we’re starting conspiracy theories or anything …

The final wealth of changes come in the game balancing category. Players can now switch factions to manually balance out teams, temporary invulnerability available at non-base camp spawn points is now axed, the fiendishly difficult Assault badge has its armour amount halved and, finally, the Sentry Bot, requested as part of the Tactician Badgeâ€™s secondary ability, is now a bit more useful. Not only can it actually manage to hit things when it fires, it’s a bit sturdier and automated turrets can no longer shoot them out of the sky in seconds. This should make the Air Support Specialist ribbon easy-peasy for those of you yet to obtain it.